Paper
The compromised pragmatics of diversity
by
Bonnie Urciuoli ©
(Hamilton College)
burciuol@hamilton.edu
March 2015
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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The compromised pragmatics of diversity
Bonnie Urciuoli
Anthropology Department
Hamilton College
Clinton NY 13323
burciuol@hamilton.edu
Paper delivered at Georgetown University Round Table (March 6, 2015)
Panel: "Discourses of Diversity"
Organizers: Zorana Sokolovska and Alfonso Del Percio
Abstract. The referring expression diversity has become routine in organizational discourses,
where it is treated as a concrete measurable category. It is better understood as an emergent
property of the interplay of markedness and unmarkedness within a structured set of social
relations, and in relation to a more general context. People’s experience of markedness
within a social formation is chronotopically organized, taking on meaning in particular times
and places. At the same time, generalizing markedness as quantifiable units of diversity
makes it possible to eliminate that experiential specificity, disconnecting diversity from
context and making it available for use toward other organizational aims, such as institutional
promotion and branding. Once disconnected from the structural properties that give rise to
the experience of markedness, diversity can be connected to neoliberal agency and treated as
a constitutive element of individuals. In a market-saturated social world, diversity discourses
(especially where quantifiable) can be good for an organization’s bottom line. To illustrate
this point, I offer the parallel cases of discourses of social diversity in undergraduate liberal
arts education, and the touting of linguistic diversity in corporate or government discourses. I
show that that disconnection is never quite easy: diversity alone rarely seems to carry enough
promotional punch. Marketers routinely connect notions of social and linguistic diversity to
readily neoliberalized notions of skills, leadership, innovation and authenticity, all of which
can be found in higher education and corporate discourses. But while skills, innovation, and
so on can easily be cast discursively as something that the individual (as student or worker)
“has”, diversity itself never quite manages to shake its structural underpinnings, is never quite
disconnected from the particular lived time/space-bound envelopes of relationship and life
experience-based realities of those considered diverse.
Short summary (50 words) Diversity is routinely treated as concrete and measurable, but it
is an emergent property of markedness relations, lived and meaningful in particular times and
places. Though marketed in relation to neoliberalized properties of individuals (skills,
innovation, authenticity) diversity’s marketing potential is always compromised by the echo
of lived experience.
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Language skills are obviously needed in today’s increasingly global economy--and
diverse workers often have this proficiency. If a company needs specific knowledge
or language skills, it may hire foreign nationals for help. In some markets,
international job seekers have the advantage. For example, companies breaking into
European, Asian or Latin American markets will need foreign expertise. High-tech
firms in particular are expanding into countries abroad. In the United States, we like
to believe that English is “the language of the world.” While that may be true for
business, our native tongue ranks second in the world behind Chinese and just slightly
ahead of Hindustani. To truly build relationships with the other people of the world,
we must speak their language. It is a tremendous advantage of workplace diversity if
we enable people from other cultures can help us understand not just their words, but
also the meaning behind what they are saying.i
In their 2011 discussion, Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton outline the tension between
entrenched notions of named, bounded languages and the assorted dynamics pulling social
configurations and experience of speakers in complicated directions. This latter dynamic
reality is pretty much the opposite of the kind of thinking about language difference that
typifies that opening quote. As is typical of business notions of diversity, whoever wrote it
presupposes the isomorphism of named language, named country, and named ethnicity -- not
surprisingly, given the ends to which ‘diversity’ is imagined as a corporate-friendly value.
Such imagining necessarily excludes consideration of how the various elements making up
whatever is considered diverse came into existence, that being especially problematic.
Linguistic diversity is necessarily imagined as the capacity to use different languages as a
skill set. That imagining generally excludes the chronotopes that frame people’s experience
of those languages. Whatever elements of identity possibly affiliated with such language
experience get repackaged as some kind of accompanying skill set.
This neoliberalized reimagining of language, the subject of much recent work, forms
one end of the profit-pride polarity outlined by Heller and Duchêne (2012), contrasting
language speaker as worker with language speaker as ethnic citizen. The notion of that
worker has been developing since the 1990s as a “bundle of skills” fitted to the needs of the
work place, an imagining now routine in corporate discourses (Urciuoli 2008). The literature
mapping out that worker has become accepted wisdom in human relations discourses. In it,
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worker diversity is understood as those personal characteristics (soft skills) or forms of
knowledge (hard skills) that provide ‘value added’ to their employers. At about this time,
Jaffe (2007) argues, a parallel paradigm emerged in which language difference came to be
similarly imagined as ‘value added.’
Barakos (2012) provides an excellent example of this in her discussion of the decline
in Welsh speaking among northern and western rural populations and the rise in Welsh
speaking among urban businessmen in Wales’ Anglicized south. Welsh language policy, she
notes, is designed to be both promotional (advance the status of Welsh, endorse bilingual
corporate identity, show symbolic cultural commitment) and to operate as a “grassroots tool
for regulating modes of interaction” (p. 174). Along comparable lines, McEwan-Fujita
(2005) addresses the way neoliberal language planning in Scotland has run along lines
dictated by funding principles and economic goals, excluding from consideration any
minority-language planning based on sociolinguistic or linguistic anthropological or any
other relevant social science principles. Not that such language planners are likely to be
remotely interested in anything that social scientists have to say. The kind of language
planning and policy that Barakos and McEwan-Fujita describe and that many other
ethnographers have examined, including contributors to the Heller-Duchêne volume, is done
with an eye toward reimagining difference as a form of human capital.
The problem with imagining language is part of the larger problem of imagining
social diversity: what is language imagined to be, by whom, and to what end. The key
difference is whether a social formation is construed with an eye toward accurately
accounting for what actually exists, as is the case with social science notions of diversity and
superdiversity, or whether it is construed with an eye toward maximizing profit somewhere
along the line. The former – paying attention to what actually exists – sees a generation of
demographic complexity, in which never-settled categories of difference are continuously
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produced. The latter – imagining difference as categories of human capital to enhance
corporate gain – necessitates the design of categories that are sharply distinguished from, but
quite comparable to, one another. Such categories involve a template of elements by which
any one employee can be compared to any other employee. Each of those elements must
have some identifiable utility and also must be measurable or assessable in some way. Their
value also depends on some degree of macro-micro isomorphism, the individual being
identifiable with the group in some defining way. To that end, they partake of those qualities
that Irvine and Gal (2000) describe as iconization and erasure: people who represent a
category must in some way iconize it, and variation among different representatives of that
category must be regarded as unimportant.
Such a template is readily supplied by consultant Marilyn Loden (1996), who has
provided the go-to blueprint cited endlessly on websites within and outside the U.S.ii Loden
proposes a model of diversity made up of primary and secondary dimensions of each
individual’s social constitution, the most recent version listing nine primary and eleven
secondary dimensions. The primary dimensions (age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, income,
spiritual beliefs, class, gender, physical abilities and characteristics) are those which Loden
finds “. . . particularly important in shaping an individual’s values, self-image and identity,
opportunities and perceptions of others. We think of these primary dimensions as the core of
an individual diverse identity.” The secondary dimensions (first language, family status,
work experience, communication style, cognitive style, political beliefs, education,
geographic location, organizational role and level, military experience, work style) represent
“essential dimension of an individual’s social identity.” Each of these identity dimensions
constitutes an element contributing to a whole worker. Note the parallel between language
and ethnicity/race in this model, as two among many diversity dimensions possessed by the
worker.
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In this model, the speaker is not a person so much as a skills bundle, each of which
exists as a category by virtue of its capacity to be counted as an enhancement of human
capital. What counts as human capital exists in a hierarchic relation to some larger end,
shaped by company or national policy or both. Barakos provides a detailed account of this as
she describes the shift from the 2003 Welsh national language policy focused on language
choice and establishing the equal status of Welsh and English in public agencies and
administration to the 2012 national policy focused on “promotion and persuasion”
(2012:171). Thus neoliberally restructured, the value of Welsh becomes measurable in some
sense of return on investment such as its capacity to extend service provision and enhance the
experience of customers, and Welsh speakers gain value to the extent that they can facilitate
those ends. More broadly, the end is private sector efficiency or expansion, the means (one
of many) is the use of Welsh, and the vehicle by which that means is delivered is the speaker.
In other words, speaking Welsh and identifying as Welsh cannot be enough unless they are
justifiable in ROI terms.
So why should this be a problem, if the goal is to promote acceptance of difference?
Shouldn’t there be an allowable range of methods to effect such promotion, and isn’t it
impractical and purist to think otherwise? Well frankly no. When ‘diversity’ is processed in
these comparably quantifiable ways, as worker-means-to-corporate-ends, the discourse is not
about accepting difference but about using it in ways that have little to do with the human
beings involved. With the shift to commensurability as a means to an institutional or
corporate end, difference as such ceases to exist, or rather what ceases to exist is the
condition of markedness that led to the emergence of difference in the first place.
The linguistic and social distinctions (understood as the referents of diversity) are best
understood as emergent properties. They reflect an interplay of markedness and
unmarkedness qualities in historically situated, economically and socially structured
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relations. The experience of markedness is chronotopically organized within such
formations, as noted by Dick and Wirtz (2011:E7) drawing on Silverstein (2005, after
Bakhtin). The experience of difference is linked to relationships, contexts, times, places, in
specific configurations growing out of discursive interaction linking present and prior
discursive events to each other and to discursive types recognizable to those sharing common
qualities, in this instance, qualities of markedness – the more marked, the more shared. The
more forms of differentiation emerge, the more people are likely to experience
chronotopically complex relations. Since chronotopicity is a function of the properties
structuring people’s social worlds, it is never fixed. People’s experience of it can range from
the relatively stable to the very complex and fluid, as must be entailed by the experience of
the superdiverse.
None of the distinctions that emerge from such processes are readily susceptible to
the kind of fixed, commensurable classifications that constitute institutional and corporate
diversity discourses. In fact such discourses operate independently of any chronotopically
specific experience except in the most emblematic and generalizable way. But then again,
the whole point to corporate and institutional diversity discourses is to get rid of all that
messy experiential specificity. Not only is it useless for measuring ‘added value,’ but the
whole point is to disconnect diversity from context and connect it to neoliberal agency as a
constitutive element of individuals. This is readily seen in the practices and policies by
which the Posse Foundation recruits cohorts of ‘diverse’ students into colleges and
universities. Posse promotes its recruits as agents of change, a “new kind of network of
leaders” reflecting “the country’s rich demographic mix”: “The key to a promising future for
our nation rests on the ability of strong leaders from diverse backgrounds to develop
consensus solutions to complex social problems.”iii Posse presents its outcomes in ways
countable as units of measurement, such as who goes on to graduate or professional school
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and who has what scholarships. Thus, the notion of students acting as change agents is made
manifest as measurable accomplishments: the higher the numbers, the more this can be read
as a form of social change. Projecting success onto countable outcomes is not necessarily the
same as actual structural change, but that may be less important than the intended rhetorical
impact of such ‘outcomes’ as a promotion of neoliberal values.
What counts here is the affiliation of diversity with other elements of neoliberal
agency (Gershon 2011), wherein every constitutive element of self is valued by its
deployability, as if one ran oneself like a business. Diversity as simply racial identity or
knowledge of a language is not enough to constitute value but such identity or knowledge can
enhance the value assigned to neoliberal typifications of valued human capital like
leadership, changemaker, and other ways of casting individual value as the capacity to
contribute to an organization, and for pretty much the same reason that Welsh has been
redefined as a valued language because of its capacity to “promote and persuade” otherwise
unreachable markets. Knowing a language cannot simply be good in and of itself, it must be
deployable in the act of communication, i.e. as part of a skill set. Thus, as Heller (2003) and
Roy (2003) have shown, the use of French in Canadian call centers reinforces a shift in social
meaning away from a user’s ethnic identity and toward neoliberal subjectivity defined by
possession of skills. Such deployment of language as a skill requires considerable
disciplining of linguistic production: in the case of call centers it is tightly scripted and the
speaker is rarely the author of the script. The language itself would be used with attention to
a generic standard, or the playing off of standard and non-standard as in Duchêne’s (2009)
study of Swiss multilingual operators deploying major languages in standardized ways
while using non-standardized local languages to provide touches of authenticity.
In the same way, deployment of social markedness such as racial difference operates
within a frame of neoliberal value. To return to the Posse example, students who enter
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college through Posse are continually channeled toward highlighting aspects of self that the
institution will best value. They are also more likely than unmarked students to be tapped to
contribute to the institution’s brand, highlighting the fungibility of diversity’s representative
units. Diversity in higher education is notoriously a numbers game, and much of the value of
‘diverse’ students lies in students’ capacity to provide content for given categories of
distinctive difference: N% of each category playing its role in the mosaic of public
presentation, accompanied by a mosaic of faces on institutional visuals. Any diverse student
can replace any other diverse student in this representation. This structuring extends to the
kinds of campus participation roles in which such students routinely find themselves, running
the ‘diversity’ organizations, serving on campus committees, and variously representing the
institution. Such participation can become grueling (Childs, Nguyen and Handler 2008).
And while racially marked students often seek each other out to find comfort in
chronotopically linked experience, that experiential residue has little value in and of itself
(unless of course it can be turned into some kind of institutionally promoting product
purveyable on its website). Yet for those students, like the speakers who supply ‘diverse’
languages, that experience is what makes their identity or their language real.
In institutional and corporate discourses, diversity is less a referring expression than a
pragmatic device indexing an organization’s orientation to a particular set of neoliberal
values -- values which, ironically, exclude in too many ways the best interests those who
actually “bring” diversity to that organization.
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Childs, Courtney, Huong Nguyen, and Richard Handler. 2008. The Temporal and Spatial
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i
http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-of-diversity-in-the-work-place
accessed 2/24/15
ii
http://www.loden.com/Web_Stuff/Dimensions.html accessed 2/16/15
iii
http://www.possefoundation.org/about-posse/why-posse-is-needed accessed 2/18/15
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